"A New Zealand technician got fire balled in the face," a member of the HVAC-talk.com forum stated bluntly. He was referring to a case where an HVAC tech got burned when he thought he was working on a system with…
Guest post by Leigha Dickens, Green Building Coordinator for Deltec Homes, who earlier this year was a student in our home energy rater class. Guest post by Leigha Dickens, Green Building Coordinator for Deltec Homes, who earlier this year was…
I think I first heard the term greenwashing in 1990, as I was getting ready for the big 20th anniversary Earth Day event in Tarpon Springs, Florida. 'Green' was starting to get some traction as a marketing term meaning 'environmentally-friendly'…
I've seen a lot of nasty crawl spaces. I've squirmed through their squalor and squeezed through their narrow confines. Possums, snakes, spiders, and camel crickets have kept me company in the dank, musty underworlds that so many people live above.…
Air conditioners use refrigerants to move heat from inside your home to the outdoors. The old refrigerants were bad for the ozone layer in the stratosphere. The first replacement, R-22, is better but was meant to be used only as…
ASHRAE† is meeting in Denver this week, and my friend Robert Bean, the mastermind behind the Healthy Heating website, tweeted the other day that they're going on a tour of NREL's new net zero energy building. I'd love to go—both…
In my last article, I explained some of the basic science of phase changes, referencing the Wicked Witch of the West and the phase change she underwent when Dorothy threw water in her face in The Wizard of Oz. (I've…
Which takes more heat — melting a pound of feathers or raising the temperature of a pound of feathers from the melting to the boiling point? OK, let me rephrase that. If the Wicked Witch of the West melts at…
Many of the problems that people experience with cooling their homes are pretty straightforward — simple to fix and often simple to prevent. Of course, there are also bigger problems, like bad insulation, air barriers, and duct installations, but today my…
You know how when you change the filter in your air conditioner, it has a little arrow on the edge showing which way the air is supposed to flow through it? What do you think happens if you put it…